A PIO card for Mr Naipaul: Horror is truth, truth is horror
During the Rape of Nanking (1937), the ruthlessness of the Japanese Imperial Army was so casual that Tokyo newspapers reported the events from the Chinese town as though they were reviewing the...
View Article'Time' needs a gag order, that is, an order for good gags
Joel Stein's collegiate taunts in a Time magazine article have provoked heavy-duty harangues in the media and the blogosphere. That is puzzling because, in the end, Stein's sociology-lite offers an...
View ArticleWhy Swiss hotels hate Indians, the masala militants
Saul Bellow once wrote that luxury hotels allow no 'opposing greatness'. Indeed, when guests take the elevator to their rooms, the event uncoils the pomp of ascension: liveried figures crunch into...
View ArticleCaste-away in housing society
Holidays are rare for journalists, so I never fail to use mine to reaffirm my worth - as sanctioned by the folks in my apartment complex. My residential block, I have learnt, does not vary...
View ArticleBuri nazar waley, terey muh par chasma
The kindest compliment anybody could give my father was, “He looks fine”. It would hearten me so much that I would always repay the thought, adding tributes about the sprightliness and rowdy cheer of...
View ArticleIndia: Land where best quotes are tailored
Facebook chatter has the half-witted bravado of someone who has just fallen in love. Newspaper editorials tend to speak with the voice of a doctor who, with incriminating blood reports in hand,...
View Article'You’re being insulted for quality & training purposes'
A new ritual has been added to the heaving list of cultural rites that Indians cannot avoid. The recent addition is the dutiful appeal for feedback. The provider of every service and facility, which we...
View ArticleArgumentative Indian is now a LOL-ing Indian. Boring
Boredom crushes my soul like a Gujarat police bulldozer on a bottle of bootlegged Teacher’s. That would seem surprising because this is the age of stimuli. Today, cellphones are alive with the Sound of...
View ArticleStigma of being unmassaged in Thailand
The passport arrived at last, in my 41st year. Before I got it, I was made to prove my mettle by crawling under the barbed wire of demeaning verification. Some of the questions asked were: "What! You...
View ArticleThe cool Gujarati
He relaxes while the rest of India works itself into a frenzy over the election . Psephologists, forecasters of moods of sub-castes, voting-queue algorithmists, astrologers and speech...
View ArticleBe grateful, there won’t be any rape on Raisina Hill
Anthropo-legal theories cruise unstoppably like that bus with tinted windows, And legislators say you have no moral right if a salon has fixed your eyebrows, Water canons to the right of Indians, water...
View ArticleWhy Indian classical music matters
The headline is weighty, coming from a man whose knowledge of the matter is light. I can recognize only three ragas. Maaru Bihag, because "Tum toh pyaar ho, sajna" from "Sehra" (1963) is based on that...
View Article'Moving on' from national horror: A German solution
Many Indians drive German cars; fans of each brand will quote — with their eyes closed — long tracts from owner's manuals during biblical battles on the question of wiper velocity. Many more Indians...
View ArticleHow we killed romance of newspaper
News lost its magical velocity when high-rises, the internet, and cellphones diminished paper-throwers into mere vendors. These days news is delivered as a feeble beep of an SMS; when I was young, news...
View ArticleTables turned, I will never criticize Sachin again
Like a general who had ignominiously survived the battle to which he had sent his finest men to die, I surveyed the smooth and terrible killing field in front of me. The killing field was the table...
View ArticleCall me Ishmael: How I avoided strip search in the US despite being Indian
It is easy to be arrested in America because the country teems with agencies that have the power to arrest. In fact, only after India was outraged by the arrest of Devyani Khobragade — one of our...
View Article
